Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  Overton pondered that. “Meaning they don’t plan any more wells, after the last three are completed?”

  “That’s what I would guess,” she said.

  “That also means that, once the last three are completed, the drilling program has achieved its end.”

  “I’m thinking, General, that we’re getting close to a deadline.”

  “Yes, but a deadline for what?”

  “Consider Nineteen thirty-nine.”

  “I don’t want to. You have an idea about what they are, don’t you, Amy?”

  “Yes. But I need to confirm it.”

  “Are we getting too harebrained?”

  “I want to take the top off of a dome.”

  *

  “Jesus Christ!” Hannibal Cross said. “You’re out of your mind, Marvin.”

  ,The others on the conference call waited quietly. All of the Joint Chiefs were on the line, along with Adm. Richard Lorenzen, the commander of Atlantic Fleet submarine forces, and Marvin Brackman. On the other side of Brackman’s office, David Thorpe sat in a chair and listened intently to the voices on the speaker.

  Brackman finally said, “You’ve all seen the data. I think this is the next step.”

  “What did the Ohio get, Dick?” Cross asked.

  “She sonar-mapped most of the area and took water samples,” Lorenzen said. “Those platforms are anchored in depths ranging from six hundred to seventeen hundred feet. There is no oil spillage, and what’s more, Hannibal, she never did pick up the sound of a pipeline. Those things make a noise, you know. Average water temperature in the area should run about forty degrees Fahrenheit, but is much higher near a well. At three hundred yards, the temperature readings were about forty-five degrees. At two hundred yards, as close as the Ohio approached a well, the readings showed seventy-one degrees. Rough extrapolation suggests that the temperature at the core, at the well casing, might be as high as two hundred degrees. Perhaps higher. The Soviets sent in the Typhoon, and she came back with similar data.”

  “Anyone run into the Black Forest?” the chief of Naval Operations asked.

  “The Ohio left the area earlier than planned when they heard the Forest approaching.”

  The army chief of staff, a man holding engineering degrees, said, “Sounds geothermal to me, gentlemen. In an awfully dangerous place.”

  “Another item,” Lorenzen said, “The marine life has definitely deserted the region. Sonar operators generally bitch about the number of whales fouling their readings, but they didn’t pick up one whale within thirty miles of the wells. We’re still analyzing water samples, but on first examination, the algae count appears to be higher, suggesting a warming of the seas. And lastly, we have recorded sonar readings of the wells. There are some big, big turbines in operation, and I think we could probably suspect turbine-generators.”

  “Is that enough confirmation for you, Marvin?” Cross asked.

  “Colonel Pearson,” Brackman said, and seeing Thorpe nodding vigorously, added his name, “and General Thorpe would like to see unprotected infrared data.”

  “Shit,” the chairman said. “The National Security Council will come apart at the seams.”

  “Skip them,” Brackman said. “Go right to the President and get a Presidential Finding. The CIA does it all the time for covert ops.”

  Cross mulled it over. “He would probably go for it, but he’ll make it contingent upon another negative response to a State Department inquiry.”

  “Do it any way you can, Hannibal. I don’t think we want to wait a hell of a lot longer. If State gets involved, insist upon a deadline for the response.”

  “Such as, Marvin?”

  “Such as, give the Germans until ten o’clock tonight to respond.”

  “All right. I’ll try that out. In the meantime, gentlemen, in the event that our guesswork is correct, I want everyone, meaning your immediate staff people, considering the next phase. What steps do we take?”

  After he hung up, Brackman looked to his intelligence officer. “I think, David, you can contact Overton and Pearson and tell them to prepare the operation. They’re to stand by until they have a final approval from me.”

  “Will do, Marv.”

  “I’m going to call Sheremetevo and tell him to keep his people out of the area tonight. When one of those domes splits open, we don’t want the Soviets catching the blame. And bitch as they might, the Germans will have a hell of a time laying the responsibility at our door when they won’t have radar or infrared evidence of an intruder. You’re sure about the missiles?”

  “Yup. Outside of a few of our people, no one has ever seen a Wasp. They don’t have any identification on them, and McKenna’s at Jack Andrews, now, preparing some special Wasps. There’s not going to be any evidence.”

  “I hope not. How big is this hole going to be?”

  “Just whatever Pearson needs to get a reading.”

  “I trust that we’re that good.”

  “We are,” Thorpe said. “That’s why it’s called a surgical strike.”

  *

  The meeting at Templehof was a scheduled one, and Eisenach arrived on time, at three o’clock. His pilot settled the helicopter on the pad, next to a car waiting to take him to the administration building.

  It was only a 160-kilometer flight from Peenemünde, but he was feeling tired. His days seemed to be getting longer, and he would just as soon be at home on the edge of the Tiergarten, enjoying a schnapps and putting his feet up on the windowsill.

  After he was seated in the Mercedes, his adjutant, Oberst Maximillian Oberlin closed the sliding window between them and the driver and asked, “The progress is satisfactory, Herr General?”

  “Not quite, Colonel. The engineers insist that they are on schedule, but their schedule does not correspond to anything I ever put on paper.”

  The driver pulled out of his parking spot and headed down the tree-lined street.

  “Engineers can be wily,” Oberlin said.

  “Exactly. There are six vehicles fully constructed, but only the first two have all of their internal components. I am told the first is operational, but they hesitate when I ask to see all of the successful test data.”

  “Who hesitates, General?”

  “The man who is second in charge of the project. Goldstein.”

  “Ah, the Jew.”

  “Yes. It is too bad that we need his brain.”

  “Though not for much longer,” Oberlin said. “If the first test flight is successful, the man could be relinquished to private enterprise.”

  “Or elsewhere,” the general said. “He has insulted me often enough.”

  “I can see to it,” Oberlin offered.

  “Please do.”

  “Somewhere in the North Sea?”

  “That would be pleasant,” Eisenach said, his mind already picturing a man stepping out of a helicopter at 2,000 feet over the sea. Not stepping out willingly, of course. “Now, what surprises do the intelligence staff have for us today?”

  “Mostly, they will be complaining about Schmidt’s decision to launch a SAM at the Soviet airplane. They will say it draws unnecessary attention to the wells. The feeling is that reconnaissance flights do not reveal a great deal to the observers.”

  “Still,” Eisenach said, “it is disturbing that the Soviets even mounted a reconnaissance mission over the Greenland Sea. Their normal haunts are the Barents and North Seas.”

  “True. And speaking of the seas, the Black Forest reported a possible sonar contact with a submarine in the Greenland Sea.”

  “Identification?”

  “No. The contact was momentary.”

  “That is not a normal passage for either American or Soviet submarines, Maximillian.”

  “No, General, it is not.”

  “Unless it is another of their celebrated treks under the North Pole.”

  “Yes, that could be it. Then, too, there have been inquiries about the wells, channeled through the Ministry of Foreign A
ffairs.”

  “I see. Who inquires?”

  “The Americans, the British, the Soviets, and the government of Greenland.”

  “All instigated at the request of the Americans, no doubt, so as to throw off suspicion on the Americans alone.”

  “Perhaps, General. Or perhaps it is the Soviets who are behind it.”

  “And that Greenpeace boat captain? Has he complained to anyone?”

  “Not as yet,” Oberlin said. “We thought that they might go to the United Nations and squeal like pigs, but they have been uncharacteristically quiet”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Then, too, General, these information requests have a new requirement. They demand information about the wells prior to a deadline at twenty-two hundred hours.”

  “Or?”

  “There is no ‘or’ stated, Herr General.”

  “But it is implied. I think, Maximillian, that it would be wise to notify Weismann. Have him maintain continual air coverage tonight.”

  “Very well, General. And Admiral Schmidt?”

  “No. He’s done enough damage so far.”

  *

  In Hangar One, McKenna and Munoz watched as the two ordnance technicians installed the Wasps. There were four of the missiles to be mounted on the right-hand inboard pylon. The port pylon mounted a gun pod.

  They had spent most of the day, after Volontov had taken off on his return trip to Murmansk, with 1st Lt. Mabry Evans, the ordnance specialist, preparing the missiles. The Wasp was designed with retracting fins which opened outward on launch in atmospheric conditions. In space, where the fins were useless, the gimbal-based rocket motor provided directional control. The first modifications involved replacing the fins and the motor with fixed units. Stationary fins and a stationary motor, if they were ever recovered, could not give rise to speculations about the missile being a space-based device.

  TNT charges had been placed in the electronics/guidance compartment, to obliterate the black boxes upon impact. After the missile detonated, there wouldn’t be an integrated circuit or silicon wafer in pieces large enough to identify.

  The Wasp warheads were interchangeable, depending upon the objective — air-to-air or air-to-surface. Typically, a Wasp was prepared in the air-to-air configuration, with a warhead containing twenty-one pounds of high explosive.

  Evans had asked, “What are we penetrating, Colonel?”

  “That’s a problem, Mabry” He showed the man a close-up photo of a dome. “They’re flat, triangular panels, fifteen feet on a side. Each one is joined to the next by a four-inch-wide strip of metal. Along each edge of the strip are bolt heads, spaced one foot apart, and staggered from one edge to the other. We’re pretty damned sure that behind the triangular panels is insulation, then probably an interior panel. Pearson believes the panels are aluminum, rather than fiberglass, but we don’t know how thick the insulation layer is, or what it’s composed of.”

  “Each section would be prefabricated at some factory, then brought to the site and bolted together?”

  “That would be my guess,” McKenna said.

  “Temperatures in the area?”

  “Wintertime, they get down to around eighty below wind chill,” Munoz told him.

  “That would be a relief, after being stationed in Chad,” Evans said. “I’m going to say that they’re using a Styrofoam core, sandwiched between, and bonded to, quarter-inch aluminum sheeting, then. That would keep them light enough to handle easily during construction, and yet provide rigidity. To combat those temperatures with a minimal expenditure of heating energy, I’d think the Styrofoam would be at least a couple of feet thick.”

  “However,” McKenna said, “according to the IO, we’re less concerned here with keeping cold temperatures out than we are with hiding excessive heat within.”

  “Hiding it from … ”

  “Infrared measurement.”

  “I see. Well, hell, Colonel. I need the interior temperature.”

  “Unknown. But the hotshots say it could go as high as six hundred degrees.”

  “Fahrenheit?”

  “Right.”

  “And we’re hiding it? Damn, offhand, that could require Styrofoam walls maybe ten feet thick.”

  “Let’s work off that assumption, then, Mabry.”

  “How big a hole do you want?”

  “Amy-baby,” Munoz said, “would like to remove three triangular sections.”

  “No way in hell we’re going to do that. It’s got to be five, if we manage a direct hit on an intersection. Triangles intersect five at a time.”

  “Do five,” McKenna said. “Then there’s another itsy-bitsy problem.”

  “Of course there is,” Evans said. “What?”

  “We strongly suspect that the domes are compartmentalized inside. Partitions, divisions, whatever. We won’t get much of a reading if we open up a section over a dormitory.”

  “So you want three or four holes, five panels each.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  Evans calculated for a while, then said, “What I’m going to do is preset a proximity instruction in the missile computers. That will keep the missiles about twenty feet from each other on the flight in. I’ll slave three of them to the first missile. You’ll have to launch all four at the same time, but the pattern of impact will be spread eighty feet apart.”

  “Good,” Munoz said.

  “No way in hell you’re going to actually hit an intersection of panels.”

  “You questioning my marksmanship?” Munoz asked. Evans just grinned at the WSO. “We don’t want to kill anyone, I suspect?”

  “No, not if we can help it,” McKenna said.

  “I’ll use fifty pounds of HE in a soft metal cone, and I’ll also use a proximity fuse setting of three feet. Those hummers will go off before actually contacting the dome, but the concussion should do the job. Providing there isn’t a supporting partition directly under the panels affected.”

  “The domes are designed to be self-supporting, from what I understand,” McKenna said. “If there’s a partition of some kind directly under an impact site, it wouldn’t be a load-bearing wall.”

  “Maybe the wall crumbles, then,” Evans said.

  “You’re overloading the warhead,” Munoz said. “What’s that going to do to me?”

  “I’m pulling the radar-seeker guidance, which will balance the weight to some extent, so you’ll have to go with the visual guidance.”

  “At night, with only a strobe light on the dome?”

  “You’re the marksman,” Evans said.

  “Well, hell, gringo, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. I’ll get them in there.”

  “We’ll still be overweight in the nose cone. You’re going to lose half a Mach of speed and fifteen, twenty miles of range.”

  “That’s okay. On visual, I want to be close in, anyway,” Munoz had said.

  Now the last of the revamped Wasps was jacked into place and fitted to the short pylon. Evans supervised the attachment, then walked out from under the wing and joined Munoz and McKenna.

  “That’s it, Colonel. As much time as we spent on them, I have to guarantee they’ll work.”

  “Thanks, Mabry. I’ll take your word.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now, it’s coffee time.”

  McKenna and Munoz walked across the wide hanger and entered the pilots’ dressing room. Their pressure suits were spread out on a wooden bench, ready for donning. A fifty-five-cup coffeepot gurgled in one corner.

  Munoz stretched out on a bench and went to sleep.

  McKenna waited, a mug of strong coffee close by. He read the New York Times, a day old.

  At eleven-fifteen, he called the dining hall and had them send over hot roast beef sandwiches. Munoz woke up the second he smelled hot gravy.

  Chewing, Munoz asked, “What’s the time, amigo?”

  “Eleven-twenty-five.”

  “Ten-twenty-five in Bonn.”


  “That’s right.”

  “What’s holdin’ them up?”

  “Based purely on experience,” McKenna said, “I imagine that an indecisive mind has been added to the chain of command. Oval Office, Pentagon, maybe Cheyenne Mountain. Worse, maybe one of the Congressional oversight committees got involved. There’ll be debates raging.”

  “Figures.”

  At eleven-forty, the intercom buzzed, and McKenna got up from his bench to punch the button.

  “Relaying radio communication to you, Colonel,” the operator said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Kevin, Jim Overton here.”

  “We going, Jim?”

  “Affirmative. I’ve just launched Delta Yellow. You can take off within the next half hour.”

  “Roger.”

  McKenna used the intercom to call operations. “Scramble my ground crew, Major. I want to be off the ground in twenty minutes.”

  Munoz was already zipping into his pressure suit.

  Delta Blue lifted smoothly off Runway 18 twenty-one minutes later, and McKenna immediately put the craft into a climbing left turn.

  Munoz tried to contact Conover. “Delta Yellow, Delta Blue.”

  “Delta Blue, this is Alpha One. Cancha hear me?” Dimatta was monitoring the operation.

  “Go Alpha.”

  “Delta Yellow is in blackout. Give him smother six minutes.”

  “Geez. He coulda left his answerin’ machine on. Blue out.”

  “Okay, Tiger, let’s go over.”

  “Roger. Ignition checklist comin’ up on the small screen.”

  Ten miles out of Jack Andrews, at 9,000 feet above the barren desert, the rocket engines ignited. McKenna let them run at 70 percent thrust for two minutes, then shut them down at 80,000 feet of altitude and at a speed of Mach 4.

  “There’s the Med,” Munoz said. “I met a girl in Algiers, once.”

  “Nice girl?”

  “Out-damned-standing, compadre. She had one flaw, though.”

  “Wanted to get married?”

  “You read my mind, all the time?”

  They were at Mach 3.5 over southern Greece when Conover called.

  “Delta Blue, Yellow.”

  “Go Yellow,” McKenna said.

  “We breezed through. I’ve got greens on two camera pods and a gun.”